JavaScript 69 – progetto di un linguaggio di programmazione – 4

Compilazione What we have built is an interpreter. During evaluation, it acts directly on the representation of the program produced by the parser.

Compilation is the process of adding another step between the parsing and the running of a program, which transforms the program into something that can be evaluated more efficiently by doing as much work as possible in advance. For example, in well-designed languages it is obvious, for each use of a variable, which variable is being referred to, without actually running the program. This can be used to avoid looking up the variable by name every time it is accessed and to directly fetch it from some predetermined memory location.

Traditionally, compilation involves converting the program to machine code, the raw format that a computer’s processor can execute. But any process that converts a program to a different representation can be thought of as compilation.

It would be possible to write an alternative evaluation strategy for Egg, one that first converts the program to a JavaScript program, uses new Function to invoke the JavaScript compiler on it, and then runs the result. When done right, this would make Egg run very fast while still being quite simple to implement.

Ma no, non si fa, a meno che, dice Marijn: If you are interested in this topic and willing to spend some time on it, I encourage you to try to implement such a compiler as an exercise.

Copiare When we defined if and while, you probably noticed that they were more or less trivial wrappers around JavaScript’s own if and while. Similarly, the values in Egg are just regular old JavaScript values.

If you compare the implementation of Egg, built on top of JavaScript, with the amount of work and complexity required to build a programming language directly on the raw functionality provided by a machine, the difference is huge. Regardless, this example hopefully gave you an impression of the way programming languages work.

And when it comes to getting something done, cheating is more effective than doing everything yourself. Though the toy language in this chapter doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done better in JavaScript, there are situations where writing small languages helps get real work done.

Such a language does not have to resemble a typical programming language. If JavaScript didn’t come equipped with regular expressions, you could write your own parser and evaluator for such a sublanguage.

Or imagine you are building a giant robotic dinosaur and need to program its behavior. JavaScript might not be the most effective way to do this. You might instead opt for a language that looks like this:

This is what is usually called a domain-specific language, a language tailored to express a narrow domain of knowledge. Such a language can be more expressive than a general-purpose language because it is designed to express exactly the things that need expressing in its domain and nothing else.